You finally get the thing. The car. The promotion. The six-pack abs. The espresso machine that could pull a perfect shot even during a power outage in Naples. And for a glorious week, your life is different. You feel lighter, sharper, like a new edition of yourself just dropped. Then one day you’re driving that new car to work, sipping espresso like it’s tap water, and your abs are hiding under the same T-shirt you’ve worn since college.

That, my friend, is the hedonic treadmill. And you’ve been running on it your whole life.

What the Hedonic Treadmill Is

In psychology, the hedonic treadmill (or hedonic adaptation) is the tendency for humans to return to a baseline level of happiness despite major positive or negative changes. You can win the lottery or lose your job, and eventually your emotional needle drifts back toward its original resting point.

Think of it like the treadmill at your gym: no matter how fast you run, you’re still staring at the same beige wall, wondering why the air smells faintly like disinfectant and regret.

Is It a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Both.

The Good: Hedonic adaptation is your built-in shock absorber. It keeps you from staying crushed after bad events forever. Lost a relationship? Eventually, the sting fades and you’re laughing at memes again. Humans are remarkably resilient thanks to this adaptation.

The Bad: It’s also why the things you think will “make you happy forever” barely make it through the honeymoon phase. You get used to them. Comfort becomes background noise. That’s why billionaires can be just as miserable as the rest of us — they’ve adapted to yachts the way you’ve adapted to indoor plumbing.

Real-World Examples

  1. The Tech Upgrade: You drop $1,200 on the latest phone, marvel at its camera for a week, then use it mainly to check the weather and doomscroll.
  2. Moving to the Beach: At first, you wake up early to watch the sunrise. Six months later, you’re sleeping through it and complaining about sand in your car.
  3. Fitness Goals: You grind for months, hit your ideal weight, and within days your brain is like, “Cool… so when are we getting abs like that guy?”
  4. Relationship Glow: Those early months of hand-holding and candlelight eventually give way to texting “pick up milk” and arguing about thermostat settings.

Your Happiness “Set Point”

Research suggests that about 50% of your happiness comes from your genetic baseline. That’s your “set point,” and like your resting heart rate, it doesn’t change much without effort. The other 50% is split between circumstances (about 10%) and intentional activities and mindset (about 40%).

Translation: buying a bigger TV isn’t going to shift your long-term happiness needle, but habits and mental frameworks might.

What It Means for Relationships

The hedonic treadmill explains why the butterflies fade. The honeymoon phase isn’t a scam; it’s just your brain getting used to your partner. This isn’t necessarily bad — deep comfort and shared history can replace the high of early novelty. But if you rely solely on that early spark to carry the relationship, the treadmill wins and you both get bored.

The trick is to keep adding novelty: new experiences together, new challenges, even new ways of showing up for each other. Otherwise, you risk upgrading partners like you upgrade phones — expecting the latest model to fix the problem, when really it’s your operating system that needs work.

How to Step Off (or at Least Slow Down) the Treadmill

You can’t fully escape it, but you can game the system:

  1. Practice Gratitude: Sounds corny, works like magic. Daily appreciation for what you already have keeps the “wow” factor alive longer. Journaling is a time-tested way to cultivate gratitude.
  2. Inject Novelty: Try new hobbies, travel to unfamiliar places, cook something you can’t pronounce. New experiences slow adaptation.
  3. Savor, Don’t Binge: Whether it’s dessert, a TV series, or time with someone you love, stretching it out builds more long-term satisfaction.
  4. Invest in Experiences Over Things: Memories hold their shine longer than objects.
  5. Work on Your Baseline: Sleep, exercise, meditation — the unsexy stuff that quietly raises your set point over time.
  6. Borrow from the Stoics: Marcus Aurelius and crew knew the secret: rehearse the worst so you can appreciate the present. It’s called negative visualization — imagining life without what you have now. It’s not morbid; it’s a way to make your current life feel like a windfall instead of wallpaper.

The Uncomfortable Truth

You’ll never beat the hedonic treadmill completely. Even monks get used to the mountain view. But knowing it exists changes the game. Instead of chasing the next big thing hoping it’ll finally make you whole, you learn to get more mileage out of what’s already in your hands.

Maybe the point isn’t to run off the treadmill. Maybe it’s to stop staring at the wall and start noticing the view from your spot on it — because the wall’s not going anywhere, but your perspective can.